The Rise & Fall of ECW (22 page)

So Spike sent a tape with four complete matches, and two weeks later got another call from Tazz, who offered him a job if he could get back east. Fortunately, Spike was working for a company that had New York offices, so he got a transfer, packed up his Toyota Tercel, and drove across the country to join ECW.

Tazz had explained the character they wanted. “They were down to just four Dudleyz,” Spike says. “They wanted to make a little character out of me, like the cartoon character, ‘Hey Spike, Hey Spike,’ that sort of thing—a little maniac, being crazy, getting the crap beat out of me and coming back for more. I said fine. I had not seen much ECW. I had seen a couple of clips of Sabu, but that is about it. We didn’t have it on television out where I had been. I had no idea what to expect. I just knew it was an up-and-coming promotion that had good TV time, and I was going to get some experience. I said, ‘Sure, whatever you want me to do, I’ll do.’”

Spike, with spiked hair and a tie-dyed T-shirt, had a memorable debut. “My first match was insane,” he says. “At the time Bubba was feuding with D-Von. D-Von was a heel, and he was with Axl Rotten, against Bubba and Big Dick Dudley. It was one of the TV tapings at the ECW Arena, and those guys are fighting all over the place.

“In the middle of the match, Big Dick comes down to the ring with a duffel bag. He dumps it in the middle of the ring, and I pop out of it. The crowd was wondering what the H was going on and who was this little runt. I immediately get destroyed by D-Von. He beats the crap out of me. I disappear, crawling back to the dressing room.

“A few minutes later, those guys are fighting back and forth, and Bubba and D-Von are on the balcony of the arena. The week before, Bubba had dived off that stage from the speaker onto D-Von. Bubba and D-Von had fought their way back to the stage and the buzz was that Bubba was going to jump off again. I had come out and gotten to the stage, so instead he picked me up over his head and threw me off the stage. I landed on D-Von and Axl.

“After the throw, everyone is fighting through the crowd, and it is chaos,” Spike remembers. “Bubba is going at it with D-Von. Now, keep in mind, I just met these guys. D-Von had Bubba down and he is beating on him. Now, D-Von is basically my opponent, so I jump on D-Von’s back. D-Von doesn’t realize it is me. He thinks it is just some fan from the crowd who jumped on his back. So he reaches over, grabs me by the back of the head, and does a judo toss over the shoulder. We are on concrete, and he puts everything he could behind it, because he wanted to lay the guy out, except it is me. I hit the concrete so hard I thought I was dead. D-Von looks down at me and says, ‘Oh, shit. Sorry, Spike.’

“I had no idea what I was walking into,” Spike says. “For the two or three years I wrestled prior to that, I was with the same twenty or thirty guys, and knew everyone. We didn’t have any experience, but we knew each other and everything was familiar. I get to ECW, and first of all, the arena is a shithole. Guys are getting wasted left and right, wrestlers are beating the shit out of each other, without regard to their bodies, without any sort of wrestling training, what I could see. Some of them knew what they were doing, but so many of them were just idiots, going out there so abusive and self-destructive, for the sake of violence. I thought a lot of it was some of the stupidest shit I had seen in my life. I thought to myself, ‘I moved from the West Coast for this at $75 a night. What the hell was I doing?’ I was terrified. My first initial thoughts were that I hit rock bottom. I thought I was in for a world of hurt. I was petrified.

“But that changed. Paul E. made you feel so special. After my debut at the arena, he came back and gave me a hug and said I did great, and said, ‘Kid, we’re gonna have some fun with you. Welcome aboard.’ It made me feel cool. This was my introduction to big-time players. Then there was the electricity of ECW. It was not like any other atmosphere. My initial reaction to it was that it was stupid. I thought someone was going to get killed. But the more I was exposed to it, and the more I learned about it and saw that guys knew what they were doing, and I was the one who was green. It got better with each match.”

Spike moved to Long Island, where he was to continue training at the ECW House of Hardcore school with Tazz, Perry Saturn, Mikey Whipwreck, and Bubba. “Bubba stayed on top of things,” Spike says. “If I screwed up, he was right there in my face. ‘Why did you do that, what did you do wrong?’ All that stuff. He was only doing it for the best of reasons. I was a Dudley now, and he didn’t want this green kid to come in and screw up the Dudley angle. He stayed on top of me and made sure I did the right thing. I think he came to respect me and realize that I tried to do the right thing. We traveled together and he sort of became my big brother. D-Von and I always had a great relationship. We had the same type personalities.”

It seemed like everything was popping in ECW that year. They took the Tommy Dreamer-Raven scenario to a new level. The Public Enemy was gone. The Gangstas were the hot tag team, and they started to promote The Eliminators as well. They brought together the Dudley Boyz and successfully introduced another new Dudley, Spike, to add a whole different element to the Dudleyz story. And they welcomed Shane Douglas back into the fold.

Douglas had left in June 1995 for WWE and had a disastrous run there. Vince McMahon changed him from “The Franchise” Shane Douglas into a character called Dean Douglas. It was based on Douglas’s legitimate past as a schoolteacher. Douglas would do these vignettes by a chalkboard, “I am Dean Douglas, and I will educate you on the art of wrestling.” At the end, he would scratch the chalkboard. He was a flop. Douglas asked Heyman if he could get him out of his contract and back to ECW. “Shane knew I could get on the phone with Vince, because I had no problem handing him Austin and all these different guys,” Heyman explains. “So I called Bruce Prichard, and I said, ‘Bruce, I need you to conference in Vince.’ So he conferences in Vince at home. I said, ‘Vince, Shane Douglas is in my locker room, and he wants to quit. He doesn’t want to work for you anymore.’ Vince said, ‘Why the fuck doesn’t Shane Douglas tell me he wants to quit? Why does he want to quit?’ I said, ‘Because he feels that he will never be a star for you.’ Vince said, ‘Do you want him back?’ I said, ‘Yes, I could take him back and make a star out of him.’ Vince said, ‘Fuck, Paul, you didn’t stand in my way with Steve Austin, you know Foley is going to come work for me.’ I said, ‘Yes, Mick just told me that I have about three months to finish him up.’ Vince said, ‘I figured three months would be good for you.’ I said, ‘Three months is fine. I have no problem with a guy giving me three months notice.’ Vince said, ‘If you want Shane Douglas back, you tell him I will have his release to him out by Monday. You have my blessing. Do anything you want with him tonight. He’s done.’ I walked over to Shane and asked, ‘Do you have an interview in your heart?’ He said, ‘Oh, fuck, do I have an interview in my heart.’ I said, ‘I don’t want you to bitch about Vince. I want you to go up into the ring and say, “For those of you who want to know how 1996 is going to go, you can look forward to the return of ‘The Franchise,’” and then just walk out. Just that much of a surprise. Less is more. And that is what he did.”

There was a lot to feel good about in ECW. The end of the year brought even more new faces, and some of them were very familiar to wrestling fans. A big man—6-foot-3 and 370 pounds, with a tattoo covering the top of his head—came to ECW.

Scott C. Bigelow—better known as Bam Bam—was born in Asbury Park, New Jersey, on September 1, 1961, and was trained in wrestling by one of the legends of the business, Buddy Rogers, as well as by Larry Sharpe. He began wrestling in 1985 and would bounce around various independent promotions here and in Japan, with a brief stay in WWE before he returned there in 1993 and established himself as a star attraction. At
WrestleMania XI,
he wrestled New York Giants linebacker Lawrence Taylor.

Bam Bam was friends with another newcomer to ECW, one of the most popular wrestlers in the business among his peers—Chris Candido, who would join up with Bam Bam and Shane Douglas to form the Triple Threat in ECW.

Candido, whose grandfather, “Popeye” Chuck Richards, was a professional wrestler, began wrestling at the age of 16 on the independent circuit. He was trained by Larry Sharpe and made a name for himself in Smoky Mountain Wrestling and had a stay in WWE before coming to ECW at the end of 1996.

Candido would battle personal problems throughout his career, and in 2005, at the age of 33, he died of walking pnuemonia. His presence in ECW was a fond memory for many of his colleagues, and he was a welcome addition to the locker room when he arrived.

“Chris Candido was a terrific human being who did so much for so many people,” Al Snow says. “He was self-destructive. He had his demons. But he was so talented and loved the business so much, and when you watched him perform, you could see he came alive. He was happiest when he was wrestling. He had a great sense of humor. We would sit backstage and laugh and joke. You would have the Triple Threat out there, Shane and Bam Bam, with Bam Bam just doing his thing and Shane being all serious, and there is Chris making it all look so effortless, taking a big suplex, falling down, and then doing the Curly spin around the ring, lying on his side and spinning around the center of the ring. Sabu would get so aggravated with him. Sabu would be real serious, and hit him with a punch, and Chris would act like he was cutting himself to get blood, when he didn’t even have a blade. The reason he could do that was that he was so good, he could horse around in the middle of the match. He loved what he was doing.”

Francine worked with Shane Douglas, and so she was close to the Triple Threat. “Chris Candido, God rest his soul, and Bam Bam Bigelow, we kind of hung out together and traveled together,” she says. “Bam Bam was a big teddy bear. Chris Candido was one of the best people I have ever known. He loved life and loved to have a good time out there. He was awesome, a wonderful person.”

Lance Storm, who would join ECW the following year, was brought there by Candido.

“Chris was so much fun to work with,” Storm said. “He was always about the match and not about himself. There was never, ‘Who’s going to win?’ or, ‘How can I get my stuff in?’ It was always about the match and how best we could entertain the fans, and sometimes, even more importantly, entertain the boys.”

Everybody was pretty entertained, both in the locker room and in the stands, by what went on in ECW in 1996. But not all of it was entertaining. Some of it was so frightening and disturbing that it nearly ended the good times—for good.